Beyond Inclusion, Toward Belonging

a sermon on vines and burning branches

Hi folks!

Thanks again to Arianne Braithwaite Lehn for writing for the Blue Room last week. That post went out with a typo in the link to her wonderful Substack (my bad!) so here it is if you want to subscribe to her newsletter and start your Mondays off right.

This is technically a “down” week for me in the Blue Room as I keep working on the book, but I have a sermon from Sunday, September 8 I thought I’d share. And I’ll be preaching Sunday, September 22 at 10:15 EDT at Trinity Presbyterian Church, Herndon or via livestream.

Virginians! Minnesotans! Illinoisans! Almost 25% of my readers hail from these three states. Early voting in Virginia and Minnesota begins TODAY, and in Illinois on the 26th. Whomever you support, early voting is an easy but impactful way to support your preferred candidate. Early voting lists get reported to the campaigns, and can keep them from having to chase you down later with a phone call or door knock, which saves resources. Plus if you share your early “I voted” selfie with friends and family, it reminds them to vote as well. Let’s have a HIGH turnout election this year.

OK… away we go:

~

MaryAnn McKibben Dana
Trinity Presbyterian Church
September 8, 2024
John 15:1-8

Why Church? The Church as a Gathered Community

It’s September, which means we’re nearing the end of my first growing season at my little garden plot at Lake Anne, and I am here to tell you, potato plants and sweet potato plants are nothing alike.

I planted my potatoes in nice rows and they grew… large, but basically rooted in one place. Not so sweet potatoes. Sweet potato plants are vines. By the end of the summer the place was carpeted with them, hiding some nearby carrots, snaking up my tomato cages, blocking the peppers from the sunlight. I battled those suckers for months.

Recently when I harvested the rest of the sweet potatoes, I was clearing out the vines, and I snipped the vines at the bottom of the cages, figuring that once they die it’ll be easier to untangle them from the cages.

Now, sweet potatoes also come with these beautiful purple blossoms. I paused to admire them and take a picture before cutting them. Perfect bells of brilliant purple color. I cut the vines and went about some other work, and came back, just minutes later, and the blossoms were already completely drooped. They had withered after being pruned from the main vine, which I expected… but I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly: almost instantly.

“Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.” Whew! I get it now.

But this teaching gets a little harder to swallow when we move from purple-blossomed vines to people.

 “Whoever does not abide in me,” Jesus says, “is thrown away, cast into the fire, and burned.”

Oof. As the kids say, I don’t vibe with that. As I told the newcomers’ class on Thursday evening, my earliest awareness of Presbyterians was a high school friend, a Presbyterian friend from Lubbock Texas, who appreciated his denomination because, and I quote, “We don’t go around damnin’ people to hell for stuff.”

And it’s true. We don’t. But we know that some Christians do. Some Christians spend a lot of time in judgment, trying to decide who’s in and who’s out—despite the fact that Jesus says that’s God’s job—who’s worth their time, their resources, their compassion, their care… and who’s not. And they’re only too happy to let everybody know, and what’s worse, to try and impose their judgments on the world at large.

So yeah… not my vibe. And probably not yours either, because if it were, you wouldn’t be sitting here in a Presbyterian church, and not at this Presbyterian church, where we really try to walk the talk of people who seek to follow the way of Jesus, people who are grafted onto that vine. We don’t get it exactly right—no human endeavor will ever get it right—but we seek with all our hearts to do so. To love God, love neighbor, and make a difference.

Amy-Julia Becker is an author and speaker who addresses issues of faith, culture, and disability. The Beckers’ daughter Penny has Down syndrome, and as Penny has grown into adulthood, Amy-Julia Becker has learned a lot about what it means to welcome. Or to use the metaphor of this text—how do we live as if anyone would be welcome as part of the vine, nurtured by the vine-grower?

In her work, Becker teaches about a continuum of welcoming.

On one end is exclusion. Exclusion looks like outright rejection. You can’t be here. 

Next on the continuum is tolerance: tolerance is neutral. It says, you can be here, but the space was not designed with you in mind, and we don’t particularly care if you are here or not. Please don’t get in the way.

                  Becker presents these concepts to all kinds of groups, and taught a group of fourth graders some time ago. She asked three students to come forward and gave two of them a ball to throw back and forth. She asked the class, what would exclusion look like? The class answered immediately: make the third child leave the room.

                  Becker asked the students, what would tolerance be? “She can watch the game and be in the room,” they said. “But she can’t play.”

Next on the continuum is inclusion. Pretty hot term in the culture right now. For Becker, inclusion means, you’re welcome here, but make sure your presence doesn’t ask too much of the rest of us. We are happy for you to be here as long as you don’t expect us to change.

                  Becker asked the class of fourth graders what inclusion would look like. At that point, the two girls playing ball became a circle. The two original girls got fewer turns throwing and catching. The new girl got to participate. But she played by the rules that had already been established. She conformed to the current reality.

Finally, the last stop on the spectrum: belonging. Belonging makes the welcome explicit and specific to people who’ve traditionally been ignored, maybe even shunned. It doesn’t assume people know they’re welcome just because we say “all.” Belonging says, “we aren’t us without you.”

“What if,” Becker asked the class… “What if this new girl has never learned these rules? Or what if she’s never played before? Or what if her body or brain are different so she can’t throw and catch or she drops the ball all the time?” One option, of course, was to move back to tolerance or exclusion. Another option is to realize that the relationship with the third child is more important than preserving the status quo of the game. 

“Oh!” one student said, with her whole arm held up high, hoping I would call on her. “Oh! You just change the game!” (Source)

Becker does this work with groups because she’s witnessed first hand what it looks like when people have excluded her daughter, or simply tolerated her. But I suspect each of us in this room has had experiences on this spectrum of being excluded or barely tolerated. And if we’re really honest, we’ve also had experiences of being the ones who did the excluding. Or the ones who simply tolerated. Or the ones who included others so long as they played by rules that made us feel comfortable. We all have those places in our hearts. We’ve identified those folks, members of the human vine who, if they were thrown in the fire, we wouldn’t lose too much sleep over it.

“Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away…” Jesus says. But does he actually say that? I’m not one to argue with biblical translators… oh wait, I am. I have just enough memory of Greek to know that the word that’s translated anyone—people—could just as easily mean anyTHING. That is, anything that does not abide in Christ—any part of myself that seeks to judge and exclude, any mean attitude or wilted place—needs to be pruned away for my own spiritual health, but also for the health of the whole plant. What needs to be snipped away in me, in you, in us, what fear or self-centeredness or certainty or judgmental attitude needs to be pruned and discarded for the good of us all?

When we read language of “burning” in the scripture, we can’t help but think of hell, the fires of judgment. And maybe Jesus’ listeners did too. But it was also standard agricultural practice to burn your prunings—as straightforward as me throwing mine into the compost bin. Fire was useful back then—it provided light and warmth, it was good for cooking, the ashes were used for soap and other practical purposes, and perhaps even to fertilize future plants. If God is a loving vinegrower, then we can trust that even the parts of ourselves that need to be cut away can be useful for our growth. In the divine garden, nothing is wasted.

We have our own vine activity here at Trinity this month as we consider “Why Church?” Thanks to some creative and enterprising folks, we invite you to participate in our CommUnity activity out in the narthex… a board with lots of different characteristics on it. You’re invited to take a piece of colored string and weave it around the circle, wrapping the string around the attributes that describe you. It’s a way to symbolize that you are not just one thing. And that WE are not just one thing. Our own connective vines will crisscross one another, and a piece of art will be formed to represent the diversity that is Trinity. A place where we seek to find a way for all to belong.